Recently I found myself constrained by the puny 200GB of my Mac Book Pro and I bought a 500GB Seagate drive to replace it (a fast 7200 rpm one). The Macbook Pro has no easy access for the drive so you have to resort to dismantling the case to access it. This put me off replacing the drive because I would probably be voiding the warranty and was running the risk of damaging this expensive piece of equipment.

I’ve been filling the drive with pictures from my recent camera purchase and I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I bought the new drive and went online to find some good tutorial on how to crack open the Macbook Pro case.

After a few searches, I noticed that many people were referring to the iFixit.com website. It was very easy to find the tutorial I was looking for, I didn’t have to register, and each step was made very clear and simple. It took no time to open the case and replace the drive. I was very happy with that find.

Now, that’s not the end of the story.

A couple of days before I replaced the drive the left fan of the laptop suddenly became noisy. This would happen a few times a day, at random, and would last 10-20 minutes. My only solution to get this repaired was to get to the local Apple service shop. Even though I knew exactly which part number was to be replaced, they still wanted me to:

go across town to visit them so they could see for themselves what the problem was: annoying because the problem was intermittent so I may have to go for nothing.

That took me all of 10 minutes; I placed my order on Thursday and the next Monday I received the part … halfway across the globe!

I also got a survey request from iFixit and left some comments, from which I got back two nice detailed email follow-ups, one from the CEO saying they were implementing my remarks as part of their site improvement efforts.

Well, I thought I would share this story. It’s not that often that you get excited by an online vendor that not only does its job well but goes beyond expectations.

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This is a simple technical weblog where I dump thoughts and experiences from my computer-related world. It is mostly focused on software development but I also have wider interests and dabble in architecture, business and system administration.More About me…